Heraldry's unfamiliar terminology discourages people from learning more about this fascinating subject but heraldic language is essential for the precise description of a coat of arms. This book provides a gentle introduction explaining terms and providing basic principles.

First full edition of a crucial source for knowledge of the period. The eyre roll is a major source of information about medieval life, ranging from local courts and land tenure through town customs and the status of women to general neighbourliness. This is especially important for Northumberland, where constant border raiding was detrimental to the accumulation of local records. The survival of the Northumberland Eyre Roll for 1293, recording over eleven hundred law suits, provides a rare glimpse of the county (togetherwith information on Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland) on the eve of the outbreak of the Anglo-Scottish wars; as only brief extracts from the roll have been published previously, this full edition will be warmly welcomed. Thetext is accompanied by notes and a subject index providing a full guide to topics of special interest. CONSTANCE FRASER is a retired lecturer.

Genealogist Keith Gregson takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of quirky family stories and strange ancestors rooted out by amateur and professional family historians. Each lively entry tells the story behind each discovery and then offers a brief insight into how the researcher found and then followed up their leads, revealing a range of chance encounters and the detective qualities required of a family historian. For example, one researcher discovered that his great-great-grandfather, as a child, was carried across the main street of West Hartlepool on the back of the famous tightrope walker Blondin. The Victorian newspaper report said that the rope had been tied between two chimney pots. Research into the author's own family revealed that one of his nineteenth-century ancestors lost his leg in a Midlands coal-mining accident, and that the amputated leg was buried in the local cemetery - to be joined by the rest of him on his final demise. A Viking in the Family is full of similar unexpected discoveries in the branches of family trees.

WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2018 A SUNDAY TIMES PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR 2019 'A masterpiece of history and memoir' Evening Standard 'Superb. This is a necessary book - painful, harrowing, tragic, but also uplifting' The Times __________________________________________________ Little Lien wasn't taken from her Jewish parents in the Hague - she was given away in the hope that she might be saved. Hidden and raised by a foster family in the provinces during the Nazi occupation, she survived the war only to find that her real parents had not. Much later, she fell out with her foster family, and Bart van Es - the grandson of Lien's foster parents - knew he needed to find out why. His account of tracing Lien and telling her story is a searing exploration of two lives and two families. It is a story about love and misunderstanding and about the ways that our most painful experiences - so crucial in defining us - can also be redefined. ___________________________________________________ 'Luminous, elegant, haunting - I read it straight through' Philippe Sands, author of East West Street 'Deeply moving. Writes with an almost Sebaldian simplicity and understatement' Guardian 'Sensational and gripping . . . shedding light on some of the most urgent issues of our time' Judges of the Costa Book of the Year 2018

This is a step-by-step guide to using the wealth of online records to trace your family tree from your own computer, without the need to travel to national and regional record offices. Whether you are a novice or an experienced genealogist, and whether you plan to devote just a few hours of your time or embark on a life-time hobby, this book will guide you through the mass of records available - birth, marriage and death, the census, and much, much more - so that you can trace your line back hundreds of years. You will also learn how to upload your results to the internet, both to preserve your family's heritage and to connect with relatives, so that you can exchange photos and reminiscences. Contents: Welcome!; 1. What the internet offers the genealogist; 2. How to start; 3. Finding records of birth, marriage and death; 4. Using census records; 5. Other major sources; 6. Military; 7. Wills and where to find them online; 8. Migration; 9. Newspapers; 10. Occupations; 11. The poor and workhouse records; 12. Noble ancestors; 13. Directories; 14. School and university records; 15. Working with the wider context; 16. Family medical history; 17. DNA; 18. Working with names; 19. Recording your family tree; 20. Online recording options; 21. Problems of online trees; 22. Finding living relatives; 23. Genealogical miscellany; 24. Accent and dialect; 25. Final; Key websites; Index